Glads from the Farmers’ Market – Beautiful Colors!

Dave got me a bouquet of glads at the Farmers’ Market that is beautiful, full of colors and pretty shapes.  Aren’t these magnificent?

I grow peonies, iris, zinnias and cosmos for picking but not glads. They aren’t all that difficult, but it seems silly to use limited space for flowers that we can purchase so easily.  Dave only paid $7 for 16 stems, ridiculously inexpensive too.

He bought yellow, pink, purple and red, some with contrasting centers.

I put them in my Mom’s Red Wing vase.  She had this vase as long as I can remember although she told me once that she had given it to her mother and got it back when Grandma moved to a tiny apartment.  It’s the perfect size and shape for tall flowers like glads or iris.

One neighbor around the corner grows glads and sells them from a bucket in the driveway.  He has a good sized field.

Here they are blooming.

Glads grow from bulbs and only have to be about 6 inches apart, although our neighbor gives his a bit more room.  You can re-use the bulbs next year if you dig them up in the fall and store carefully in a dry place.  If you do grow them yourself then try to buy large sized bulbs because they produce larger flowers than the smaller bulbs.  The one time we grew glads we got medium-sized bulbs and the flowers were tiny, nothing like the glorious bouquet Dave bought.

My very first business boss, Elmer J. Schmidt, bred gladioli.  He told me that the colors and patterns are purely random, that crossing red with white is just as likely to give you pink as it is purple or red or any other color.  However, it’s not completely random as ruffled or white flower parents tend to pass on those characteristics, and some plants tend to produce consistently better quality offspring.  New hybrids must come from seed as the bulbs will be identical to the original plant.

Gladioli Seeds from the Pod, Photo Linked from Fine Gardening Com

Developing new varieties would be a difficult hobby because you have to discard so many beautiful plants and keep only the very best!